Is there more plagiarism in news media today than 40 years ago? Maybe yes, maybe no.
It certainly is easier to spot today, because there are readers surfing the Web all the time — and, it seems, most of the material that journalists lift comes from the Internet.
I am not sure why this is true, although it is much easier to cut and paste material from Web sites than it is to type out quotations from books, reference resources and newspapers.
In the wake of the Jayson Blair-New York Times scandal, however, newsrooms across the country are struggling to make their ethics handbooks fit the circumstances of the 21st century. And many editors are puzzled by the apparent lack of understanding by some reporters about what constitutes plagiarism.
Plagiarism is the act of passing off as one’s own the research, conclusions and writings of another. That’s stealing, no matter how fancy one tries to make it. It takes hours, days and sometimes years to accumulate information and then present it in a coherent package. Once material like this has been published, it can be used by others looking at the same topic, but it must be credited. And, that’s where some journalists seem to get into trouble.
Most top editors of medium- and large-sized newspapers are in their 50s or 60s. They grew up in an era of
newspapers when ethical basics were drilled into the heads of reporters as they came in the door. The rules were not hard to remember: Be fair in reporting your stories; do not use the work of others without attribution; be careful with words that appear in a newspaper, because they never go away; be accurate, accurate, accurate, and do not make stuff up.
Those were the basics. They were as simple as some of the rules kids learn in elementary school (don’t copy off your neighbor’s paper, don’t talk when someone else is talking, don’t hit/punch/bite). Editors expected staffers to follow the rules and when staffers did not, they got fired.
Why? The fancy answer is that freedom of the press is an almost-sacred trust — one essential to the maintenance of an informed electorate in a democratic society. The pragmatic answer is this: What a newspaper has to sell to its subscribers is the paper’s word that its staff was fair, accurate and intelligent about covering the news and that it did not use the work of others in reports without identifying that work and the author.
When that trust is stretched or broken, then the newspaper has nothing left to sell.
Only one remedy worked in these kinds of cases: The person responsible for the plagiarism or the other egregious breach of ethics got fired.
If the person had some talent, understood the seriousness of what he or she had done and was ready to change, then he or she could rehabilitate his or her career at a small newspaper — often a weekly publication — where writing farm reports and playground wrap-ups for a long enough period of time might be enough atonement to earn a berth on a small daily and then eventually back on larger dailies.
The road to rehabilitation was long and arduous, but reporters who wanted a place in the industry followed it a footstep at a time. Now it seems the road to rehabilitation often includes a book and movie deal. My word.
High school teachers and college professors across the nation are discussing plagiarism. It has become a significant problem in education — amid an atmosphere where students can buy term papers over the Internet and apparently have difficulty seeing any moral problem with such purchases.
The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. — a think tank and training resource for journalists — recently convened a panel of journalism heavy hitters to take a look at ethics. One of the areas they discussed was attribution and sourcing. One of their strongest statements was this: “Our responsibility to the reader is to make clear where we got our information.”
Enough said.
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The Reader Advocate’s phone number is (801) 257-8782. Write to the Reader Advocate, The Salt Lake Tribune, P.O. Box 867, Salt Lake City, Utah 84110. E-mail: reader.advocate@sltrib.com.
This week’s stats:
98 Number of readers who are still upset over the new format of the newspaper’s weekly TV supplement
46 Number of readers who called about the size of type in stories
25 Number of readers who claim their copy of The Tribune is “wrinkly”
2 Number of readers suspicious about the veracity of news reports on the deaths of Saddam Hussein’s two sons
